Helen's death in 1995 at the age of 92 marks the end of an era. Yet as Helen writes in her remarkable memoir, "When one door closes, another opens".

In 1932, after deciding that it would be better to be poor in the country, Helen and Scott moved from New York City to Vermont. Here they created their legendary homestead, described in Living the Good Life: How to Live Simply and Sanely in a Troubled World, which has sold over 250,000 copies and inspired thousands to move back to the land. With today's "new simplicity" movement, the Nearings' books have been welcomed by a new generation of readers.

The Nearings moved to Maine in 1953, where they continued to live their celebrated version of "the good life": hard physical work (building stone houses and growing or gathering their own food) and intense intellectual work (writing several dozen books to promote self-reliance and social justice), all the while saving time for bouts of pure fun. Thirty years later, as Scott approached his 100th birthday, with characteristic purposefulness he decided that it was time to prepare for death. He chose to stop eating, and by fasting "let the visible pass into the invisible".

As we search for a new understanding of the relationships between death and life, Helen Nearing's Loving and Leaving the Good Life provides profound insights into the question of how we age and die.